Latest articles
by Mateo Pimentel / January 4th, 2016
Gender, social justice and capabilities
Gender and social justice do not make strange bedfellows. Any injustice wrought on the basis of gender is fundamentally at odds with the belief that all people have dignity by virtue of the fact that they are human. By the same token, human dignity is fully compatible with the notion of “equal worth,” which necessitates a respect for the inherent value of all people. Equal worth moreover precludes any abridgement of the value of human beings on the basis of gender, and it takes root in the democratic ideals of freedom and opportunity. Yet, to …
by T. Mayheart Dardar / January 4th, 2016
As 2016 dawns and we contemplate our personal goals and expectations it is important to review them in the context of the geopolitical reality we currently inhabit. Here in the United States we find ourselves in the midst of what appears to be one of the most interesting and\or disturbing presidential campaigns in recent memory.
What was billed to be a hierarchal contest between two opposing but familiar political dynasties quickly became overshadowed by what can best be described as a carnival side show. Party insiders quickly dismissed it as the summer of Trump only to be confronted with a Trump …
by Felicity Arbuthnot / January 4th, 2016
Nothing justifies killing of innocent people.
— Tony Blair, CNN, January 15th, 2015
A little over three months short of the thirteenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq (March 20th, 2003) now widely accepted as unlawful even by the former UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, it has emerged that the Unit in the British Ministry of Defence established to investigate “allegations of torture and unlawful killings” by members of the 46,000 UK armed forces originally deployed has been “overwhelmed” with cases.
The Independent reports that:
“British soldiers who have served in Iraq may face prosecution for crimes, including murder”, according to Mark Warwick, …
Common Sense for the Working Vermonter: A Libertarian-Socialist Manifesto
Third Revised Decade Edition
by Green Mountain Anarchist Collective / January 3rd, 2016
As Vermonters we are perhaps the most weather conscious people in North America. We feel the winter winds through the drafts of old farm houses, smell the melting snow when collecting our sap buckets, hear the birds of summer while tending our farms and gardens, and see the beauty of fall written across the hills in oranges, reds, and yellows. Many of us still work with our hands, be it as loggers, farmers, carpenters, midwives, or crafts-people. When the leaves fall we still hunt deer, and many of us still …
by Kathy Kelly / January 3rd, 2016
Here in Kabul, last week, at the Afghan Peace Volunteer (APV) community home that hosts me, I watched Abdulhai and visiting activist Aaron Hughes work out ways to secure the greenhouse which they had partially assembled that morning. Warmed by the effort and with the sun beaming down on all of us, they sat on the garden ledge in their shirtsleeves although it is a quite cold winter here, talking about the greenhouse perched on an uneven garden plot before them.
I had watched Aaron, Abdulhai, Ron and Hakim maneuver the partly assembled greenhouse from a neighbor’s storage area, over a …
by Andre Vltchek / January 2nd, 2016
Day and night, for years, an overwhelming force has been battering this quiet nation, one of the cradles of human civilization.
Hundreds of thousands have died, and millions have been forced to flee abroad or have been internally displaced. In many cities and villages, not one house is left intact.
But Syria is, against all odds, still standing.
During the last 3 years I worked in almost all of Syria’s perimeters, exposing the birth of ISIS in the NATO-run camps built in Turkey and Jordan. I worked in the occupied Golan Heights and …
by Edward S. Herman / January 2nd, 2016
Mark Weisbrot, a co-director with Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), has written an enlightening book that pulls together many of the analyses that CEPR has been producing over the past several decades. The book, Failed: What the “Experts” Got Wrong about the Global Economy, is important and useful because it provides an alternative framework of analysis to the one used by establishment experts, media and policy-makers. What is more, this alternative framework and description of reality is well supported by empirical evidence and is …
by Eric Walberg / January 1st, 2016
The defeated ogre, licking his wounds, finds little comfort from his hawkish “best friend”, despite his love for Israeli birds for whom he helped raise more than ten million Canadian dollars to build a bird sanctuary in the Promised Land. This was in preference to Canadian birds, who along with almost all other Canadians, had their funding slashed.
He did this with the help of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), an innocuous sounding organization, one which operates worldwide, but one which was founded to ‘disappear’ Palestinians and their homes, building bland pine …
Resolution severely criticises the "Occupying Power"
by Stuart Littlewood / January 1st, 2016
Can this be true?
Something important and, freedom lovers may think, rather wonderful seems to have happened at the United Nations, and it went largely unreported in mainstream media. The UN General Assembly approved a draft resolution ‘Permanent sovereignty of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and of the Arab population in the occupied Syrian Golan over their natural resources’ (document A/70/480).
It was adopted by 164 to 5 against (Canada, Israel, Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, United States), with 10 abstentions (Australia, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Honduras, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, South Sudan, Togo, Tonga, …
by Roberto Armstrong / January 1st, 2016
If graded in terms of encouraging and developing a well-rounded and informed citizenry in a democratic country, the best most public schools I am familiar with would be a “D”. Put simply and bluntly, our public primary and secondary schools, our community colleges and universities are bureaucratic institutions whose main social and intellectual aim and achievement is the indoctrination of students in the prevailing corporatist-consumerist-racist-sexist social norms and whose primary institutional interest is self-preservation.
Certainly some of the worst effects of this system have been leavened by imaginative and deeply dedicated teachers who have been fighting worthwhile and, too often, losing …
by Carolyn Coe / January 1st, 2016
They have descended from homes built on the mountainside. Women sit together in the cemetery not to mourn but to wait for the duvet distribution to begin. When I approach them, each woman extends a hand in greeting. Some have the needed small stamped pieces of paper to receive two duvets but most don’t. One of the women tells me about the pain in her chest, her legs. She talks about the war. I listen to all the manifestations of her suffering. I understand only a handful of words but as …
by Eve Mykytyn / January 1st, 2016
Much has been made of the ‘fact’ that the top 20 donors to the Sanders campaign are all unions and the top 20 donors to the Clinton campaign are corporations or law firms. This is probably true as far as it goes. Various leftish wing sites go on to explore that the corporations give far more money to Clinton than the unions can supposedly afford to give to Sanders.
Information such as this fits nicely into the idea that Sanders is a left wing candidate who will, at a minimum, help to define Clinton’s somewhat obscure politics. The problem is that …
by Scott Noble / December 31st, 2015
Plutocracy is the first documentary to comprehensively examine early American history through the lens of class. A multi-part series by filmmaker Scott Noble, Part I focuses on the the ways in which the American people have historically been divided on the basis of race, ethnicity, sex and skill level.
Plutocracy: Divide et Impera (Divide and Rule) includes sections on Mother Jones, the American Constitution; the Civil War draft riots; Reconstruction; Industrialization; the evolution of the police; the robber barons; early American labor unions; and major mid-to-late 19th Century labor events including the uprising of 1877, the Haymarket Affair, the Homestead strike and the New Orleans General Strike. The introduction examines the …
Fear of Arabic in USA
by Sufyan bin Uzayr / December 30th, 2015
Recently, a teacher at a school in Augusta County, Virginia handed out a homework assignment. The homework, part of the Geography curriculum, dealt with world religions. Among other exercises, it included a question asking students to copy Arabic calligraphy (in order to help them understand the complexity of calligraphy in the Arabic language).
Here is the question:
The result?
It led to an angry backlash by parents of several students, as …
by Paul Craig Roberts / December 30th, 2015
One hundred years ago European civilization, as it had been known, was ending its life in the Great War, later renamed World War I. Millions of soldiers ordered by mindless generals into the hostile arms of barbed wire and machine gun fire had left the armies stalemated in trenches. A reasonable peace could have been reached, but US President Woodrow Wilson kept the carnage going by sending fresh American soldiers to try to turn the tide against Germany in favor of the English and French.
The fresh American machine gun and barbed wire fodder weakened the German position, and an armistice …
But here's something you can do to oppose them
by Jack Balkwill / December 30th, 2015
I seem to have lost my way said Alice.
What do you mean,’your way?’ asked the Red Queen.
Round here all ways belong to me.
— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
In the famous myth, Emperor Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Although this didn’t, in fact, happen, Nero was documented to have been a tyrant who was insensitive to the needs of the common people, and it wouldn’t have been out of character.
Nero was said to have had Christians doused in oil and set on fire to light his gardens. Among those he executed was his own mother.
Throughout history, we see a great …
by L'Ordre / December 30th, 2015
Declaring that the Mont Order is a global group of dissident thinkers, the code of Mont states in its fourth point, “the Order can relate to the Islamic world and hopes that it will overcome Wahhabism and Takfiri sectarianism, which are plots sown against Muslims to attack their unity.”
The real threat is unfortunately even broader in scope, and threatens not only the lives of Muslims with chaos and the miseries of civil war but threatens everyone. No society could be immune to a power that finds comfort in dividing everyone else to make itself feel strong. What it needs …
by Carlos Latuff / December 30th, 2015
by Ellen Brown / December 30th, 2015
While the mass media focus on ISIS extremists, a threat that has gone virtually unreported is that your life savings could be wiped out in a massive derivatives collapse. Bank bail-ins have begun in Europe, and the infrastructure is in place in the US. Poverty also kills.
At the end of November, an Italian pensioner hanged himself after his entire €100,000 savings were confiscated in a bank “rescue” scheme. He left a suicide note blaming the bank, where he had been a customer for 50 years and had invested in bank-issued bonds. But he might better have blamed the …
Diplomatic Collusion
by K.J. Noh / December 29th, 2015
On December 28th, 2015, the foreign ministers of Japan and Korea, suddenly and hastily announced a “resolution” to the “comfort women” issue, women trafficked and exploited as sexual slaves by the Japanese Army during WWII. This involved an apology by the Japanese prime minister, and the creation of fund for reparations.
“The issue of ‘comfort women’ was a matter which, with the involvement of the military authorities of the day, severely injured the honor and dignity of many women,” said the Japanese Foreign Minister. 1 billion yen ($8.3M) was also promised to the fund to assist the 46 surviving comfort women.
Former …
by John V. Walsh / December 29th, 2015
Who is the arch racist, Hillary or Trump? To answer that, let us ask another question, a simple one. Which is worse: to denigrate some members of a group or religion or race – or to kill them by the millions? And maim more millions and displace even more millions? Which is more “racist”? With that in mind, who is the arch racist, Hillary or The Donald?
Do the liberals who criticize Trump, but not Hillary, as racist forget the slogan of the anti-Vietnam War movement, “Stop the Racist Bombing.”
And which causes more blowback, more revenge attacks by the victims – …
Christmas trees, carols, church services, and the resilience of the human heart
by Eva Bartlett / December 29th, 2015
Due to corporate media’s misrepresentation of Syria, some may be surprised to know that Syrians—suffering terribly under nearly five years of the foreign war on their country—are also celebrating Christmas from Damascus to Homs to Aleppo. Glittering displays, street Santas, choirs singing carols and people singing Jingle Bells, and tacky, exuberant Christmas parades are not unique to the West.
However, most Syrians I have met who are celebrating any religion’s holy day do so with heavy hearts—the loss of loved ones to NATO’s terrorists dampens festive spirits. But they also celebrate with a determination not to be cowed into submission …
by Robert Hunziker / December 29th, 2015
Throughout the world, the name Fukushima has become synonymous with nuclear disaster and running for the hills. Yet, Fukushima may be one of the least understood disasters in modern times, as nobody knows how to fix neither the problem nor the true dimension of the damage. Thus, Fukushima is in uncharted territory, a total nuclear meltdown that dances to its own rhythm. Similar to an overly concerned parent, TEPCO merely monitors but makes big mistakes along the way.
Over time, bits and pieces of information about Fukushima Prefecture come to surface. For example, Arkadiusz Podniesinski, the noted documentary photographer of Chernobyl, …
by Brian Littlefair / December 28th, 2015
Snowden as Samson, bringing the puzzle palace down around his head; Manning as Prometheus, tortured for her gift to mankind by ceaseless humiliation at the hands of dim jarhead martinets; the men who exposed the drone-massacre sweatshops, beggared by government decree; the helpless black witnesses of Ferguson and Baltimore, always photographed silhouetted by leaping flames like victims of auto-da-fé instead of killer cops. The people who lance the government’s boils have been self-sacrificing saints or martyrs: William Binney, Tom Tamm, Tom Drake, John Kiriakou. Ralph Nacchio, Sister Megan Rice. Lynne Stewart, Barrett Brown, Christopher Dorner. They were made …
Crooks and Swindlers
by James Petras / December 28th, 2015
The IMF is the leading international monetary agency whose public purpose is to maintain the stability of the global financial system through loans linked to proposals designed to enhance economic recovery and growth.
In fact, the IMF has been under the control of the US and Western European states and its policies have been designed to further the expansion, domination and profits of their leading multi-national corporations and financial institutions.
The US and European states practice a division …
The Myth Continues
by Yves Engler / December 28th, 2015
Like children’s fairy tales, foreign policy myths are created, told and retold for a purpose.
“The Boy Who Cried Wolf” imparts a life lesson while entertaining your five year-old niece. Unfortunately foreign policy myths are seldom so benign.
The tale told about Romeo Dallaire illustrates the problem. While the former Canadian General rose to prominence after participating in a failed (assuming the purpose was as stated) international military mission, he’s widely considered a great humanitarian. But, the former Senator’s public persona is based on an extremely one-sided media account of his role in the complex tragedy that engulfed Rwanda and Burundi two …
by John Andrews / December 28th, 2015
I was brought up in Rhodesia, the country named after Cecil Rhodes, so I’m quite interested in the current controversy about the removal of his statue outside Oriel College in Oxford.
The supporters of Rhodes and other champions of British imperial history, argue that it was people like him who made Britain “great”, and “civilised” the countries they conquered. They talk about the thousands of miles of railways, and imposing colonial architecture. Whilst those things may indeed still be used by the native populations there today, that was never their original purpose. Railways were laid to help transport stolen minerals and …
by Binoy Kampmark / December 27th, 2015
However much of a prat he might seem to some, Kim Dotcom’s relevance goes far beyond his self generating hyperbole and excessive enthusiasm. In the legal battles of extradition and how services on the Internet matter, Dotcom, resident in New Zealand, remains a person of importance. So important, in fact, that the US Department of Justice has been on to him and three associates since 2012.
His arrest in January 2012, along with associates Mathias Ortmann, Bram van der Kolk, and Finn Batato, demonstrated how the US state prioritises economic interest. Most terrorist suspects, actual or otherwise, get the drone treatment, …
by Robert Jensen / December 26th, 2015
I am a mild-mannered (a polite term for “boring”) white Christian man, born and raised in North Dakota, a U.S. state known for being mild-mannered. I teach university courses on freedom of expression and the role of journalism in a democratic society, concepts I take seriously. I also take seriously my obligation as a citizen to participate in conversations about public policy, but I avoid shouting. And I don’t own any weapons.
But beware—I am an extremist.
I am not extreme in the way that U.S. politicians and pundits typically throw the term around these days. I don’t advocate violence to establish …
by Shepherd Bliss / December 26th, 2015
Poet Robert Bly, now 89 years old, is a radical, by which I mean he returns to the roots. Haydn Reiss has captured him in his new, moving film Robert Bly: A Thousand Years of Joy.
Watching the film was a trip down my memory’s lane, dating back to meeting the National Book Award-winning poet in the sixties. I was in boot camp training at Ft. Riley, Kansas, home of the Army’s First Division, the Big Red One. I intended to follow our family tradition, which gave our name to Ft. Bliss, Texas. I was on my way …
